Harvest is gearing up across the province.
There are good harvest days when most everything goes well. There are also not-so-good days.
It was an unusual sight Tuesday morning as we neared the field of lentils where we had been toiling the day before.
The combine wasn’t where we’d left it. Rather than being in the field, it was parked in some unfarmable grassland beside the lentil field.
Had someone sabotaged the combine?
Upon closer inspection, it was clear the combine had rolled backwards out of the field, across an old fence line, finally coming to rest a few hundred yards from where it initially parked. The tubes on the air reel had raked the ground showing the path of the runaway.
The night before I had parked the combine on what I thought was a relatively level patch of ground so fluid levels could be checked in the morning. The table was left down, but I hadn’t pulled the park brake, never once thinking the combine could roll backwards from this location.
No damage was done, but it could have been much worse. A slightly different path could just as easily have sent the combine over a hillside akin to a buffalo jump.
Surprises for the day were not over. We filled a bin with lentils and while folding the grain conveyor down to move to another bin, a loud snap could be heard. A bushing and hinge pin lay on the ground.
The pin on the end of the big lifting ram had moved sideways, but fortunately had not fallen out completely. With some messing around, everything was aligned and put back together. The only lasting damage is a bruise on my head from not ducking low enough during the reassembly.
Bad luck seems to happen in threes. With just a swipe or two remaining in the big lentil field we’d been working on for far too long, the draper belts in the center of the combine header burst into flame.
Fortunately, there were two of us in the field at the time, the combine had two on-board fire extinguishers and the truck set up for fire fighting was nearby. After some scary moments, we had the flames knocked down and then kept dowsing the smouldering draper belts.
The two draper belts are obviously toast and probably the rollers underneath. My guess is that a bearing failed, became super hot and eventually ignited the belts.
Could have been very bad if a hydraulic hose had melted through. With a fire fueled by oil, the entire combine might have been lost.
In all three incidents, we were lucky. Looking forward to a little less excitement as harvest continues.
